ALJ Trends

     Social Security's Office of Inspector General has issued a report on Administrative Law Judge Trends.

    Below are three charts from the report. As always, click on the image to view full size.

What's Going On With The Investigation Of The IG?

     Faith Williams, Director of the Effective and Accountable Government Program at the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), has spoken with Federal News Network about the situation with Social Security's Inspector General. It's a bad situation. There's also a written report.

    When are we going to get some resolution? The investigation of the IG is going on and on. How many people are there to interview? How many documents have to be reviewed? Why is this taking so long?

SSI Application Drawing Congressional Attention

     The Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which has jurisdiction over Social Security, has written to the Acting Commissioner of Social Security to express concern over the process for applying for Supplemental Security Income benefits. The letter asks a number of pointed questions about what is going on.

Happy 88th Birthday, Social Security

 

And you made it despite constant Republican warnings that you were about to collapse.

Why Do Attorneys Keep Submitting Appointment Paperwork Over And Over?

     For some time now attorneys like me who represent Social Security claimants have had a problem with field offices delaying processing paperwork we submit appointing us to represent claimants. At least where I am this has gradually gone from an occasional problem to a common problem. We may be on the way to this becoming a problem in every case.

    Until the field office processes the appointment paperwork we can't really represent the claimant. No one at Social Security will talk with us. We can't access the claimant's file online. We don't receive notification about actions the agency takes.

    Taken to an extreme, and I fear that's where we're headed, representation of claimants becomes an impossibility. 

    This isn't happening because anyone at Social Security decided that it should happen. It's local field offices overwhelmed with work putting off tasks they regard as of secondary importance. The problem is that the workloads aren't going to decrease. There's always going to be work you can't get to. I fear that we're approaching a "Not now. Not later. Not ever" situation.

    You frequently see comments on this board from agency employees bemoaning the fact that attorneys keep submitting their appointment paperwork over and over and keep calling to ask about unprocessed appointment paperwork. What the hell do you expect to happen if you don't process the paperwork? The attorney has no idea whether the problem is that the agency never received the paperwork. They're anxious to begin representing their clients. Of course, they're going to resubmit the paperwork. Of course, they're going to call. Quit blaming the victim of your inability to process all the work you've been given to do. If you want to stop the re-submission of appointment paperwork and pestering calls about it, assign processing appointment paperwork a higher priority. Get it done in a reasonable time and we'll stop pestering you. 

OHO Operations Report

     Recently released report on Social Security's Office of Hearings Operations:

Click on image to view full size

SSI Coming To iClaims

     From a notice published today by the Social Security Administration in the Federal Register (footnote omitted):

... SSA is embarking on a multi-year effort to simplify the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) application process. ...

As part of this effort, our goal is to develop a fully online, simplified SSI application process. As an important step toward that goal, we are currently planning to implement in late 2023 the SSI Simplification Phase I initiative, or iSSI. iSSI will be a pathway in the existing Social Security internet Claim (iClaim) System that will streamline and shorten the SSI application for Title XVI disability applicants. iClaim is an online portal the public can use to apply for multiple types of Social Security benefits. Currently, this includes Retirement, Spouse's, and Disability Insurance benefits (DIB) (Title II SSDI).  ...

Title XVI applicants who want to use the internet to apply for SSI will use the iClaim system to initiate the application process and establish the protective filing date of the application. Applicants filing for themselves can authenticate online using one of our existing authentication methods, while applicants assisting others can use iClaim without authenticating. Although SSA encourages respondents to authenticate in iClaim, they can continue to use the system without authentication. 

 When applicants who use iClaim authenticate themselves, the iClaim system can use some information already within SSA records. For all applicants, the iClaim system will prompt the Social Security Disability (Disability Insurance Benefit (DIB)) questions and pre- populate the applicant's answers within the iSSI portion of the iClaim pages. The applicants would then only need to answer simplified eligibility related questions, excerpted from the deferred SSI application, that will form the core of iSSI. These are what SSA refers to as ``basic eligibility questions.'' 

After answering the DIB and SSI basic eligibility questions, applicants will be automatically transferred to other existing steps within the SSI Application iClaim path, such as providing medical information (using the i3368, OMB No. 0960-0579) and signing a medical release using the i827 (OMB No. 0960-0623). This process will be seamless to the applicant, as the iClaim system will take them from page to page without interruption. Once the applicant submits the information online, SSA technicians will review it for completeness and send it to the Disability Determination Services (DDS) to make a disability determination. ...

This Might Make Sense If Social Security's Service Delivery Problems Were Subtle, But They're Not, So It's Wasted Resources

    From Federal News Network:

Among tens of millions of beneficiaries, the Social Security Administration is trying to change its approach to customer experience by thinking about the process in reverse order.

The agency starts by considering the beneficiary’s perspective, then works outward to change interactions and services to better fit customers’ needs, said Betsy Beaumon, SSA’s chief transformation officer. ...

It’s the path that the Social Security Administration’s new Office of Transformation is taking, with one of the new office’s components targeting improvements to customer experience. After launching the office in May, the agency set a goal of driving ideas that are both good for customers and good for SSA employees, said Beaumon, the office’s leader. ...

By asking customers for feedback from the start, Beaumon said SSA can continually gather data. The idea is to connect with customers who interact with SSA across various platforms, and proactively identify pain points and areas for improvement.

“We are tapping real-time into what customer satisfaction is across different channels,” Beaumon said. ...

“It’s like gold to be able to hear from our customers directly in that focused manner,” Beaumon said. “It’ll let us make sure that our services are going to align with their expectations better, and make it easier for them to understand the application process and reduce redundancies in the process.” ...

Offering e-signatures and other digital documents, for instance, is one area that SSA employees themselves have specifically recommended a change, Beaumon said, to help ease their workloads and let them focus on other concerns from customers. ...